Computer systems commonly employ a client-server model of interaction and data transfer. In one example, certain storage systems sold by EMC Corporation include a storage management application known as Unisphere®. A Unisphere server resides in the storage system itself and communicates with a separate Unisphere client that includes a graphical user interface (GUI). A management user operates the GUI to cause the client to engage in data transfer operations with the server to provide or obtain management-related information to/from the storage system. The client-server interface employs an architecture or technique generally referred to as Representational State Transfer, or “REST”, which is based on a “resource” representation of the management data. REST requests employ resource identifiers (e.g., URIs) along with a set of basic commands such as the HTTP commands GET and POST, and REST responses include a structured text description of resource data. As an example, a storage system may represent a particular magnetic storage disk as a resource of type “disk” having a unique identifier and a set of attributes such as a size, manufacturer name, etc. The Unisphere client requests current information about the disk by issuing a request including the URI for the disk, and the Unisphere server of the storage system responds by issuing a response having a structured text description of the disk and the values of its attributes.
One feature of GUI-based client-server applications is the relationship between the structure and content of the resource data and the organization of the graphical windows or “pages” used to display the data. Continuing with the above example, the information obtained for a disk may be presented in one or more ways. For example, some portion of the information may be displayed in a multi-column table in which the data for different disks of the storage system are presented in different rows. In another context or implementation, information for a disk may be shown on a disk-specific display panel (e.g., a pane or a tabbed panel) as a list of (label, value) pairs for all attributes of the disk. In either case, the display is designed with knowledge of the data that will be used to populate it, i.e., the display is organized a priori according to the known organization of the resources and attributes, and data returned in a REST response is displayed in a predetermined manner according to the predesigned display.